Interdisciplinary Science Reviews: October 2012

Welcome...

Editor's blog

ISR is a quarterly journal that aims to set contemporary and historical developments in the sciences and technology into their wider social and cultural context and to illuminate their interrelations with the humanities and arts. It seeks out contributions that measure up to the highest excellence in scholarship but that also speak to an audience of intelligent non-specialists. It actively explores the differing trajectories of the disciplines and practices in its purview, to clarify what each is attempting to do in its own terms, so that constructive dialogue across them is strengthened. It focuses whenever possible on conceptual bridge-building and collaborative research that nevertheless respect disciplinary variation. ISR features thematic issues on broad topics attractive across the disciplines and publishes special issues derived from wide-ranging interdisciplinary colloquia and conferences.

Tuesday 30 October 2012

Launch of Digital Humanities in Practice

ISR's Communications Editor Julianne Nyhan and Editorial Board Member Melissa Terras have recently co-Edited Digital Humanities in Practice (Facet 2012)

The book will be launched in London on 6 November and you can attend by reserving a place via Eventbrite: http://dhinpractice.eventbrite.co.uk/

More details about the book are available on the Publishers Website:

http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/title.php?id=7661

It would be great to meet some of ISR's readers at the launch!

Thursday 18 October 2012

Lecture: Machines of demanding grace

Prof Willard McCarty, Editor of ISR, will tonight (18/10/2012) deliver a lecture entitled 'Machines of demanding grace: speculations toward a book on the problem of digital interpretation'. It will take place in Senate House, London (room 246) from 17:30 - 19:30. Please do attend if you are in London town!

Willard McCarty: 'Machines of demanding grace: speculations toward a book on the problem of digital interpretation'

The great anthropological question “What is man?”, raised by Immanuel Kant in 1800 and made the overarching question of philosophy, has been taken up in our time, for example, by Anthony Giddens’ exploration of the perilously negotiated process of “going-on being” in the reflexive construction of self (Modernity and Self-Identity, 1991); Ian Hacking’s dissolving away of the singular soul by probing multiple personality disorder (Rewriting the Soul, 1995); Giorgio Agamben’s “anthropological machine” evinced e.g. in Linnaeus’ homo sapiens, which he reads as denoting a creature in perpetual becoming (L’aperto, 2002); and G. E. R. Lloyd’s subtle navigations across cultures and centuries among the historical variants of “what counts as being human” (Being, Humanity and Understanding, 2012). If, then, the human is in perpetual re-formation, what is the role of computing and the technoscience it communicates? In this talk I will use Sigmund Freud’s notion of the “great outrages” perpetrated by the sciences on human self-love and the moral programme of science that it articulates to suggest tentatively a way in which the digital humanities might do better than supply data for interpretation that happens elsewhere by other means.

Biographical note: Willard McCarty, FRAI, is Professor of Humanities Computing in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and Professor in the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics at the University of Western Sydney. He is Editor of Humanist and of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews and founding Convenor of the London Seminar (2006-2012). For more see www.mccarty.org.uk.